Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

"Absolutely nothing in that. Only too happy."

The door was behind Lucinda's shoulder. Closing it, unseen by her, Lontaine contrived to exchange with his wife a look of profound significance. Then he lounged thoughtfully forward to the club car and delayed there, in deep abstraction, long enough to smoke two cigarettes before proceeding to hunt up and interview the conductor about Lucinda's change of destination, then instruct the porters to shift her luggage to the Lontaine drawing-room and his own effects to the section she was vacating.

Into making this move Lucinda had been talked against her half-hearted demurs. She knew very well it wasn't the right thing to do, to take advantage of their kindness of heart, to separate husband and wife; but they wouldn't listen to her; and after all it was hardly in human nature to undergo again the ordeal of the open sleeping-car by night if one might by any means avoid it; while Lontaine insisted he wouldn't mind in the least.

"I'm an old hand at travelling under any and all conditions," he had asserted – "accustomed to roughing it, you know. Even upper berths hold no terrors for me, while a whole section is simply sybaritic sensuality. If one hadn't brought Fanny along, it would never have entered the old bean to do oneself better than a lower. Absolutely. You don't imagine Fan and I could rest in comfort, knowing you were unhappy back there? Rather not!"

In point of fact, Lontaine had been at once eager to earn Lucinda's favour and not at all averse to a move which promised more personal liberty than one could command penned up in a stuffy coop with one's wife. Oh, not that he wasn't fond enough of Fan, but – well, when all was said, one was bound to admit Fan was a bit, you know, American. Not to put too fine a point on it, decidedly American. Nobody's fool, Fan. Had a head on her shoulders and used it, and a way of looking at one, besides, as if she were actually looking through one, now and then, that made one feel positively ratty. Chap could do with an occasional furlough from that sort of thing.

It wasn't as if they were still lovers, you see. Rough going, the devil's own luck and mutual disappointment had put rather a permanent crimp into the first fine raptures. They got along well enough nowadays, to be sure, but it was no good pretending that either couldn't have done just as well alone. But then it had hardly been in the first place what one might call a love match. Oh, yes, tremendously taken with each other, and all that; but if you put it to the test of cold facts, the truth was, Fan had married with an eye to that distant title, whose remoteness the War had so inconsiderately failed to abridge, while Lontaine had been quite as much influenced by Fan's filial relationship to a fortune of something like eighty millions. But that hope, too, had long since gone glimmering.

Rotten form, not to say vicious, on the part of the Terror of the Wheat Pit, to cut off his only begotten daughter with a shilling, one meant to say its equivalent measured by the bulk of his wealth. The legacy Fan had picked up in Chicago would have been barely enough to satisfy their joint and several creditors. Not that one was mad enough to fritter the money away like that. But if this Los Angeles venture were to turn out a bloomer…

But why anticipate the worst? Buck up and consider the widely advertised silver lining… A bit of luck, falling in with this Druce girl, under the circumstances. No question about the solid establishment of her financial standing: the good old Rock of Gibraltar was a reed in the wind by comparison… Now if only one dared count on Fan's being amenable to reason, grasping the logical possibilities, doing her bit like a sensible little woman…

Seated in Section 10, waiting for the porter to bring back his personal impedimenta from the drawing-room, Harry Lontaine turned a handsome face to the window, frowning absently, the nervous frown of a man whose cleverness has never proved quite equal to the task of satisfying appetites at once strong and fastidious.

By degrees its place was taken by a look of dreaming: Lontaine was viewing not the dreary wastes of Kansan lands under the iron rule of Winter but a California of infatuate imagining, a land all smiling in the shine of a benign sun, set with groves of orange trees and olives, dotted with picturesque bungalows whose white walls were relieved by the living green of vines, and peopled by a race of blessed beings born to a heritage of lifelong beauty, youth, and love-in-idleness; a land in whose charmed soil fortunes grew of seeds of careless sowing, and through whose scenes of subtropical loveliness prophetic vision descried a heroic figure moving, courted and applauded by happy, unenvious multitudes, the figure of Harry Lontaine, Esq., newest but mightiest overlord of the cinema…

From this delectable realm the dreamer was recalled by consciousness of somebody standing in the aisle and staring impertinently. Racial shyness erased all signs of wistfulness in one instant and cloaked sensitiveness in a guise of glacial arrogance; in another, recognition dawned, and hauteur was in turn discarded and a more approachable mien set up in its stead. Lontaine was too diligent a student of motion-pictures not to know at sight the features of Lynn Summerlad, by long odds the most popular male star of the American cinema. A personage worth knowing…

Misreading his expression, Mr. Summerlad felt called upon to apologize.

"Beg your pardon, but I was expecting to find a lady in this section, I may say a friend: a Mrs. Druce. Do you by any chance – ?"

XIX

Bridge killed the long hours of that first afternoon on board a train whose windows revealed seldom a prospect less desolate than one of prairie meadows fallowed but frozen, dusky beneath a tarnished sky: a still and roomy land spaciously fenced, scored by rare roads that knew no turning, but ran like ruled diameters of the wide ring of the horizon: the wheat-bin of the world swept and garnished by winter winds.

Lynn Summerlad made a fourth at the table set up in the Lontaine drawing-room; invited by Lontaine as an acquaintance of Lucinda's and a grateful addition to the party because he played something better than merely a good game.

Not only "fearfully easy to look at" (as Fanny confided to Lucinda) but fair spoken and well if at times a shade carefully mannered, he was intelligent and ready of wit; so that, when he proved these qualities by not forcing himself upon the trio at or after dinner, he was missed; and Lucinda, while she waited for sleep to blind her eyes that night, discovered that she was looking forward to the next afternoon, when Bridge would be again in order and infeasible without the fourth.

But she was too sleepy to be concerned about the methods with which Summerlad, making no perceptible effort, had succeeded in winning back the ground which over-assurance had lost for him at the breakfast table. It was enough that he qualified as that all too unordinary social phenomenon, "an amusing person."

She began to study him more intently if discreetly, however, when the train pulled into Albuquerque for its scheduled stop of an hour at noon of the second day, and the Lontaines and Lucinda, alighting to stretch their legs, found Summerlad, alert and debonnaire, waiting on the platform, prepared to act as their guide and protect them against their tenderfoot tendency to purchase all the souvenirs in sight.

This quiet process of noting and weighing ran like a strand of distinctive colour through the patterned impressions of the day, till, retracing it in reverie after nightfall, it was possible for Lucinda to make up her mind that she liked Lynn Summerlad decidedly. True that he was not of her world; but then neither was she herself any more, in this anomalous stage of the apostate wife, neither wife nor widow, not even honest divorcée.

If Summerlad's character as she read it had faults, if an occasional crudity flawed his finish, these things were held to be condonable in view of his youth. He seemed ridiculously young to Lucinda, but sure to improve with age, sure to take on polish from rubbing up against life. Especially if he were so fortunate as to find the right woman to watch over and advise him. An interesting job, for the right woman…

Not (she assured herself hastily) that it would be a job to interest her. An absurd turn of thought, anyway. Why she had wasted time on it she really didn't know. Unless, of course, its incentive had lain in consciousness of Summerlad's naïve captivation. One couldn't very well overlook that. He was so artless about it, boyish, and – well – nice. It was most entertaining.

It was also, if truth would out, far from displeasing.

Apprehension of this most human foible in herself caused Lucinda to smile confidentially into the darkness streaming gustily astern from the observation platform, to which the four of them had repaired to wait while their several berths were being made up. But the hour was so late, the night air so chill in the altitudes which the train was then traversing, that no other passengers had cared to dispute with them the platform chairs; while Fanny had excused herself before and Lontaine had quietly taken himself off during Lucinda's spell of thoughtfulness. So that now she found herself alone with Summerlad, when that one, seeing the sweet line of her cheek round in the light from the windows behind them, and surmising a smile while still her face remained in shadow, enquired with a note of plaintiveness: "What's the joke, Mrs. Druce? Won't you let me in on the laugh, too?"

"I'm not sure it was a joke," Lucinda replied; "it was more contentment. I was thinking I'd been having a rather good time, these last two days."

"It's seemed a wonderful time to me," Summerlad declared in a voice that promised, with any encouragement, to become sentimental.

"Quite a facer for my anticipations," Lucinda interposed firmly – "considering the way I had to fly Chicago and my husband." Then she laughed briefly to prove she wasn't downhearted. "But I daresay you're wondering, Mr. Summerlad…"

"Eaten alive by inquisitiveness, if you must know. All the same, I don't want to know anything you don't want to tell me; and I don't have to tell you, you don't have to tell me anything – if you know what I mean."

"It sounds a bit involved," Lucinda confessed, judgmatical; "still, I think I do know what you mean. And it's only civil to tell you I was leaving to go to Reno by way of San Francisco when my husband found me at the Blackstone. But now the Lontaines have persuaded me to spend a few weeks with them in Los Angeles – "

"That's something you'll never regret."

"I hope so."

"You won't if you leave it to me."

"Yes, I'm sure you mean to be nice to us; but you're going to be very busy when you get to Los Angeles, aren't you?"

"I'm never going to be too busy to – "

"But now you remind me," Lucinda interrupted with decision. "I've got a great favor to beg of you, Mr. Summerlad."

"Can't make it too great – "

"Fanny and I were discussing it this morning, and it seemed wise to us… You've seen something of how persistent my husband can be – "

"Can't blame him for that."

"Well, then: the only way I can account for his having found me in Chicago is on the theory that he employed detectives. But of course I'd made it easy for them by using my own name wherever I went."

"Why don't you use another name, then?"

"Just what Fanny and I were saying. If I don't, Bel – Mr. Druce – is sure to follow me to Los Angeles, sooner or later, and make more scenes. I'd like to avoid that, if I can."

"Surest thing you know, he'll find out, if the Los Angeles newspapers ever discover Mrs. Bellamy Druce of New York is in the civic midst. The best little thing they do is print scare-head stories about distinguished visitors and the flattering things they say about our pretty village."

"That settles it, then: I'm going to be somebody else for a while. Help me choose a good, safe nom de guerre, please."

"Let's see: Mrs. Lontaine calls you Cindy…"

"Short for Lucinda."

"How about Lee? Lucinda Lee?"

"I like that. But it does sound like the movies, doesn't it?"

"What do you expect of a movie actor, Mrs. Druce?"

"Mrs. Lee, please."

"Beg pardon: Mrs. Lee."